I Shit You Not

My two year old son comes home from having spent the weekend at his father’s family’s house with a shotgun. A toy shotgun, but a shotgun nonetheless. I honestly nearly fell over from laughing so hard yesterday. I think that’s why I’m in agony today with my face – laughing so hard.

I mean seriously. How does this not just so fucking ‘My Name is Earl’-esque?

Yup, that’s my Kid. My two year old little boy who likes to clonk around in his mommy’s shoes and wear my pink skull headband. There’s that same Kid sitting on the rug watching Teletubbies with a rifle across his knees. Am I the only one who finds this bizarre?

In what world is this an appropriate purchase for a two year old?

And how the fuck do I take this away from him without it being the end of the world?

I’m so with you this being a totally inappropriate gift for a 2-year-old! However… even though I REFUSE to have guns as toys for my boys, and the only TV they watch is CBeeBies, they build ‘guns’ from Lego, and even a completely rectangular wooden block gets wielded as a gun would, with shooting noises coming from those precious pure little mouths. It seems that, despite our best efforts, guns are a part of boys’ lives. Guess it’s just up to us to teach them the true meaning of the real thing, and to keep the real thing away from them, so that we can all be safe!

Try to make the gun dissapear when everyone leaves the house (take the gun with you to work and try to dispose of it) and when you do get home with your kid and he do search for it, search with him. Search everywhere so that he realize that no one can find it. Yes, he will probably ask for it throughout the next few days and maybe even cry but he will forget about it.

So… when your son points his finger out the window of the car and ‘shoots’ every passer by as boys do – are you going to confiscate his finger?

You can bring up a boy on a diet of CBeebies (or no tv at all for that matter) and he will still find a way to extend his destructive desires outside his body into the world. That’s what shooting is, all boys want to do it and you can’t stop them.

That said, I wouldn’t have bought my son one of these =)

@Blackhuff I totally disagree – the make-believe of Santa and the tooth fairy is one thing, but how can you honestly join in the search for the object he wants and you’ve thrown away? Why can’t you just be honest with your child? Cowardice.

Wow, that’s a bit weird. But I think that I am mainly influenced by the book I’m reading now that’s based on the school shootings in America. But when I think back to my childhood, I remember us playing cowboys and crooks or cobs and robbers with play guns. We also had water pistols and bb guns and so far, none of my childhood friends had gone around shooting people.
I think that you must do what you feel comfortable with in this situation.
.-= Twistygirl´s last blog ..I just don’t know what to do =-.

In my opinion, perhaps same as some other commenter’s – boys are boys and boys have/make/pretend/imagine they have guns. Hell, even *I* had a gun as a kid and I think I turned out to be a pretty well adjusted adult, with no I-wanne-kill-the-whole-world tendencies.

Boobah has a gun, albeit a much smaller one than The Kid’s, but it’s a BB gun nonetheless (I withheld the bullets though) . I bought it for him. He played with it for a week solid, and I think it’s probably at the bottom of his toy box right now. I did insist that he shoot ONLY his other toys or plants or bottles – even pretend shoot – and under NO circumstances must he aim for humans or animals or breakables. He got that.

I think that the more of an issue you make of it, the more he is going to want to play with it and the less inclined he’ll be to give it up. Try some of the suggestions other people came up with, but in the end, he is YOUR child, you are his mother and you will deal with this in the way that works for you and your kid. You are a good mother.
.-= Boobah’s Mom´s last blog ..Okay, so maybe i was wrong… =-.

Hmmm… I’d buy him a bigger gun to distract him, but make sure it was one of those brightly coloured pump-action water pistols that don’t really look like a gun. But then, I’m not a parent, so am not really qualified to give advice!
.-= Tamara´s last blog ..(Semi) sanity returns =-.

The only guns I’ve ever allowed for my kids are water pistols – the old fashioned, little ones, not the big-ass, expensive, pump-action ones.
Every once in a while, someone will buy my kids something I don’t necessarily approve of. I’ve found that the best way to handle it is to let them have it (unless it’s something they could actually hurt themselves/someone else with). It usually gets broken/lost/boring soon enough…